Six-word autobiographies

I take attendance by having the students answer a question complete a very brief creative writing assignment.

Today they wrote six-word autobiographies.

Many were school- or study-focused, to no one's great surprise:

• Majored in chem, not gonna chem.
• All the labs all the time.
• Too many interests, what I do?
• Work hard, algorithm harder. Word. Word.

Here we see the beginning of the recurring theme of "six, you say?"

• Naive ambition tempered to quiet hope. Rebel.
• Potato, banana.
• Went into math, forgot how to count.

And of course the silly:

• Thank gosh I'm the sane one.
• Thinking about this, unlearning network flow. (<-- lecture="" li="" of="" s="" today="" topic="">
• I tell lies all the time.
• Question: why is it a giraffe?
• Hello darkness, my old friend. [bum]

And the profound:

• Trying to do ok & stuff.
• Once upon a time, I was.
• What is the meaning of life?
• I am my own worst enemy.
• Six words is simply not enough.
• Regret for yesterday, hope for tomorrow.

I liked "Just passing this sheet along. Cool." for being six-words, self-reflective, and descriptive of the student's life without actually saying anything nontrivial. This is the kind of answer I attempt to head off at the pass on homeworks...

This post's theme word is nimiety (noun), "excess or redundancy." Homework solutions should be sufficient, and absent all nimiety.

More like MadLibs

I take attendance by having the students answer a question fill in MadLibs.

A ____________ walks into a bar. The bartender says, "___________________"

This one was a bit open-ended and I'm not sure it sparked the students' witty creative-writing skills optimally.

The traditionalist: A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Why the long face?"
The context-aware: A college student walks into a bar. The bartender says, "ID?"

The literalists: A man walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Ouch." Also appeared as "man/hello"
and "man/try the soup" and "really tall guy/that must have hurt" and "person/yo" and "man with an orange for a head/you have an orange for a head?!"

The animals that appeared were commented thusly: "dog/impressive" (not sure why; dogs walk normally), "bear/welcome", "parrot/This is it." (bartender with no patience left), "cat/hi", "puppy/This is the best day ever.", "caterpillar/You'll be a beautiful butterfly one day.", and the masterpiece of absurdism which is "very very very small horse/hello".

The jokey: A law student walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Walking into too many bars will not help you pass it."

This makes very little sense, but: A foo walks into a bar. The bartender says, "foo-bar."

The minds of mathematical bent:

• A graph walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Why so edgy?"
• A triangle walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Looking sharp."
• An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Got it --- 2 beers." (I'm guessing this is a joke about infinite sums with finite limits?)

Today's Pandering Prize goes to:

A theoretical computer scientist walks into a bar. The bartender says, "That's strange, most of our customers are travelling salesmen."

This post's theme word is clerihew (n), " humorous, pseudo-biographical verse of four lines of uneven length, with the rhyming scheme AABB, and the first line containing the name of the subject." I would like to see what my students create when prompted for a clerihew or a six-word autobiography, but creative writing attendance questions distract students from paying attention to the lecture.